Confederate Colonel

So often, Southerners are admonished to avoid stereotyping people. That’s a nice way for them to say, “quit being such intolerant bigots.” Let’s take a look at the other side of stereotyping - that is, stereotyping ourselves by saying, “this is what a ‘True Southerner’ is.”

Here is a quote from a rabidly anti-Southern web site that is quoting from a book that purportedly takes a pro-Southern view:

Chronicles magazine, in the March 1989 issue, has an article by Grady McWhiney titled, “The Celtic Heritage of the Old South” (McWhiney 1989). The article is introduced with a drawing of a man somewhat horizontal, pouring what I assume is beer into his mouth with some of it running down his face onto the ground. He is in a field with a couple cows looking on. McWhiney starts his article by stating his view that Southerner and Northerners are culturally divided and “such cultural disharmony has divided the South from the North for more than three hundred years.” McWhiney believes the South was settled by various Celtic groups and the North from the English lowlands resulting in “fundamental and lasting divisions” and eventually, he explains, the American Civil War (McWhiney 1989, Chronicles, p. 12) .

McWhiney explains what Celtic culture is by contrasting it to what he feels is English culture. Often he contrasts two paired groups, that of Celts and Southerners versus that of English and Yankees (McWhiney 1989, Chronicles, p. 13).

Unlike Yankees and Englishmen, who were compulsive plowers and often obsessed with agricultural improvements, Celts and Southerners, cultivated crops reluctantly and haphazardly.

Celts and Southerners, whose values were more agrarian than those of Englishmen and Yankees, wasted more time, rarely read or wrote, consumed more liquor and tobacco, and were less concerned with the useful and material.

McWhiney characterizes Celts and Southerners as a pastoral group that likes gambling, drinking, “raucous music,” dancing, hunting, fishing, horse and dog racing. The Celts and Southerners lack ambition, are lazy, and avoid work because they are not materialistic. If these qualities do not sound good, McWhiney becomes a multiculturalist and says they are good in the values of Celtic civilization. The English and Yankees are repeatedly described as censorious and intolerant of Celtic culture. However, McWhiney wishes the reader to know that “when outsiders supply the discipline and constancy, Celts are capable of mighty achievements as British history has shown” (McWhiney 1989, Chronicles, p. 15) With friends like this, who needs enemies?

How often have we, as Southerners, embraced our Celtic heritage lock, stock, and barrel without understanding that people and cultures change over time? Yes, many of our ancestors came here from Scotland, and yes, there is almost always a factual basis for stereotypes of groups of people, but there is more to it than that.

People and cultures are influenced and changed by their surroundings. Dixie is very different from Scotland. The weather is different, the terrain is different, the government is different, the religious environment is different, the economic system is different, etc. The early Celts were Pagans - I am a Bible-believing Born-again Baptist. That is a very fundamental difference that has a huge effect on just about every part of life. The economic system here in America presents individuals an incredible opportunity that simply was not available in the Scottish Highlands of a couple centuries ago. We could go on and on with examples.

We need to be very careful about claiming to have a “Celtic culture” or any other type of culture. We have a Southern culture - and there is a huge variation in what constitutes that. As much as I dislike it, the “Redneck” has as much claim on being “Southern” as the Southern Gentleman. I have seen Southerners boasting about having “the finest whiskey” and loving to party, and listening to nothing but country music. I cannot deny their claim to being true Southerners, but they are very different from me - a non-drinker who prefers a church fellowship to wild parties, and enjoys classical music.

We need to remember that while we here at Confederate Colonel hold the Southern Gentleman, as exemplified by Robert E. Lee, as the pinnacle of Southern Culture, there are others who legitimately claim something very different as being “Southern culture”.

Before agreeing that we embrace “Southern culture”, we need to understand exactly what the other person means by “Southern culture”. Don’t fall into the trap of having to defend a Southern culture that does not reflect you.

Mr. Mike Tuggle wrote an excellent response to my previous post regarding the League of The South. While I do not agree with his analysis and conclusion, it was well-written and explains the reasoning that I am opposed to. His reply is too important to possibly be missed in the comments section, so I am posting his full reply here, along with my own further comments. Be sure to read his related blog post on Dixienet.org.

You and I clearly agree on the goal for any real and meaningful Southern activism, and that is to preserve our culture and protect our people.

What is threatening them? It’s an out-of-control Federal government, an alien, occupying force that’s assaulting basic Constitutional rights, brainwashing our young people into abject self-hatred, and engineering a demographic revolution — all while robbing us of our tax dollars and undermining our economic security. Those are the things that are destroying our culture, and they all stem from the same rotten source, the District of Corruption.

The Southern people are remarkably resilient, and are capable of restoring their culture to vitality to where it can again become self-sustaining.

But before the wound can begin to heal, we have to remove the foreign body that is harming it. Just like the American secessionists of 1776, and the Confederate leaders of 1860-61, we must energize our people with a clear message that wakes them up to what’s being done to them, and organize them to action.

In other words, we must organize politically. Once we have restored real self-government, and can then work for our values and our goals, rather than for the enrichment of a globalist elite, our culture will self-heal and self-organize around the existing elements that are still alive and fighting.

Your clear-headed analysis tells me you’re someone we need on our side. I hope this response shows our sincerity and commitment to reach out to you and others like you with similar questions.

Perhaps some background about how I came to my conclusion about how the political process fits with this would help: When I was a candidate for political office (a county-wide office in 1992), I truly believed that if I could only get my message out to the voters, they would see that clearly I had the best, most honorable, most logical plan and background for the office. This was my first real taste of real world politics. I had been involved in various political campaigns before, starting as a college student with the Nixon re-election campaign in 1972, but I had never been a part of the strategic decision-making process of a campaign.

I learned a lot during that campaign, and I was able to apply it a few years later when I was on the campaign staff of a first-time challenger for state representative (we won, and we also won the re-election campaign two years later). Several other campaigns (always working for other candidates), holding office in the local Republican organization, and having spent the past 14 years with my own business selling software and data services to candidates, lobbyists, and PACs, has shown me that the voters are anything BUT logical. You have to reach them on an emotional level if you are going to get their attention and their vote. That’s the science behind sound-bites; that’s the science of propaganda. One’s cultural roots are one of the deepest emotional parts of the thought process (only things such as direct family can routinely be classed as being deeper). If you can appeal directly to cultural “hooks”, then you can attach your own political agenda to those hooks - and you then have that vote. A certain German dictator rose to power in the 1930’s by being an absolute master of that strategy.

The key to any political campaign (or advertising campaign or anything else that tries to influence large groups of people) is very much like planting a garden. Success depends on well prepared soil where the seeds will find water and nourishment and a lack of pests. If you sow your seeds on dry, rocky ground, the crop is going to fail. Politicians manage this by finding that good ground (saying whatever people want to hear) rather than taking the time to prepare that good ground and turning it into fertile soil. Continuing the garden analogy, we do not have that luxury - there is simply not a large enough “field” available, so we have to do the long hard work of turning poor soil into good soil. That is the core strategy that I am pursuing.

This is how issues like this are sorted out by gentlemen. Ideas are exchanged in a logical and reasonable manner. Sometimes minds are changed and sometimes they are not. I haven’t changed my mind and I am pretty sure that Mr. Tuggle has not changed his either. While we are both working toward the same goal, we are each taking a different path to get there. I think mine is better, and he thinks his is better. May God make both of us right.

When I first read about the Southern League (later changed to League of The South), I was excited about what I was reading - an organization dedicated to preserving Southern culture. I was excited about the concept of “Hedge Schools” and gave a lot of thought to how that might work and spread throughout The South. I went to a local meeting made up mostly of men in my SCV camp to discuss the possibility of creating a local Southern League group. At the time, I was already over-committed to other projects, so I put that on the “back burner” for a bit. The name changed to League of The South (LoS) due to a trademark issue with a sports league. I continued to receive the email newsletter and follow LoS publications. At some point, the focus changed.

I read a League of The South report about a national LoS meeting. In that report, they made a very clear statement that the goal of the LoS is to be the establishment of a new Confederacy. The statement was framed in such a way as to make it clear that there was some sort of internal struggle within the organization about this and that the new goals of the LoS would now focus on a political outcome rather than a cultural outcome. They were seriously aiming at a new secession movement that would reinstitute a new Southern nation. I certainly have no problem with that if it were possible to wave a magic wand and completely change the demographics and the social and cultural and political makeup of the Southern states. Not having access to such a magic wand, we are left with having to deal with the reality of the current situation - here, now, today. Having stated my reasoning in detail in other posts, I won’t try to repeat it here, but I will repeat what I believe to be the key point - Nothing changes until the culture changes.

The culture must change before any major political changes are attempted. Most political “leaders” are leaders only because they see which way the crowd is going and then run ahead to the front of the line and claim to be “leaders”. A leader who tries to gain and hold power without first shaping the culture to match his objectives is doomed to eventual failure. That is why the “Reagan Revolution” is now just a footnote in history - the culture was not there to support his leadership, great as it was.

You might ask, “What is the problem with having political power as a goal?” One problem is that you attract the wrong kind of people to leadership positions. Before we go any farther, let me make it clear that I am NOT referring to any specific persons in the LoS. I have no reason to believe that the leaders of LoS are anything but honorable men. In fact, other than Dr. Hill, I can’t name a single person in a leadership position in LoS. However, by making LoS into primarily a political movement, they are more likely to attract those who are willing to try to take the shortcut and go directly to political efforts without first doing the long hard work of trying to change the culture.

Let me offer a specific example of what happens when an organization - in this case, the LoS - gets into the political business rather than first working on the culture. Several years ago, I received a phone call from a field agent with the FBI (from a field office on the west coast of Florida). It’s a long story of how that phone call came about, but that’s not the point here. They wanted to know what this organization was all about - was it a potential terrorist group? Was it a harmless group that had or could be taken over by hot heads (or, unmentioned, by agents provocateur)? The reason that I was willing to talk with them was to try to put their minds at ease that, to the best of my knowledge, they were completely open, honest, and harmless; on the other hand, in my own mind, I had to wonder about the possibility of a rogue group within LoS that could truly be someone to worry about. It turns out that the reason they popped up on the FBI’s radar screen was a naive attempt to tell the FBI that they were NOT anything to worry about. Before that contact, the FBI (or at least this particular field office) had never heard of the LoS.

What is the point of bringing that incident up? Simple - at a time when the government is looking for boogymen behind every bush and tree (calling them “homegrown terrorists”), a group with the stated objective of secession is painting a big target on themselves. We have to ask, “to what point?” That is pointless, self-destructive behavior - unless that organization exists to gain a perceived future political power by being at the head of the line should some “black swan” event occur that would make secession possible.

Let me say again - Nothing changes until the culture changes. Without a culture change that would make a large portion of the population actively support a revival of the Old South, the only way to effect such a political change would be to do so by force. That would be absolutely intolerable - something that no Southern Gentleman could ever stand for. That takes us back to the need for the LoS to return to their founding purpose - a sharp focus on restoring Southern culture. It takes time and effort and determination and generations of time, but it is the only way for an honorable return to the traditions and ideals of the Old South - and the traditions and ideals of America’s Founding Fathers.

I firmly believe that the League of The South is an honorable organization founded and headed by honorable men who have simply lost sight of the larger goals. It is my sincere hope that the LoS will realize this and make a clear shift to focus exclusively on building Southern culture in the certain knowledge that, if successful, political change will follow cultural change. They need not seek political leadership of the people - if the LoS is successful in rebuilding Southern culture, the people will look to those who lead the cultural revival for leadership.